Judge William H. Pauley III ruled today that NSA bulk phone metadata collection, first revealed to the public in 2006 and again by Glenn Greenwald in June of this year, is legal.

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Judge William H. Pauley III ruled today that NSA bulk phone metadata collection, first revealed to the public in 2005, 2006 and again by Glenn Greenwald in June of this year, is legal. This ruling on a lawsuit against the government and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper by the ACLU is in direct conflict with a ruling earlier this month in a case brought by far-right operative and Birther Larry Klayman.

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Judge Pauley's ruling is based upon the much-discussed 1979 Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Maryland. In Smith, the Court ruled that unlike an illegal search of your home or possessions, when your phone call information reaches a third-party, such as Verizon in the context of the ACLU's suit, the presumption of privacy is lost, since you're, in effect, handing over your number and the number you're calling to a private company.

“Smith’s bedrock holding is that an individual has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information provided to third parties,” Judge Pauley wrote.

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Supporters of the ACLU's lawsuit, as well as the ACLU itself, claim that bulk collection was never envisioned when the Court ruled on Smith.

Jameel Jaffer, the A.C.L.U. deputy legal director, said the group intended to appeal. “We are extremely disappointed with this decision, which misinterprets the relevant statutes, understates the privacy implications of the government’s surveillance and misapplies a narrow and outdated precedent to read away core constitutional protections,” he said.

As of this writing, Glenn Greenwald has yet to comment on the ruling, though his reaction is likely to again rebuke the applicability of Smith as a legal precedent.

One of the president's privacy review panel recommendations was to reform the bulk collection process so that instead of NSA retaining the bulk phone records, the metadata would instead by stored by the various phone companies until needed and accessed by NSA analysts. This revised process could be further legitimized by the Smith precedent.

So at this point, the ACLU will certainly appeal the ruling. The government will also appeal the earlier Klayman ruling. From there, one of these cases is bound to make its way to the Supremes.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wrote to NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander and asked point blank, "Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?" The letter defined spying to also include metadata collection.

Scooping Glenn Greenwald, The Washington Post's Barton Gellman published details of the NSA's collection of emails and text messages that include references to and personal details about non-targeted individuals, as well as NSA success stories and questionable flaws.

Guess what? I agree with Glenn Greenwald on something. Specifically, I agree that, overall, the report issued Wednesday by the president's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies is a positive event in this ongoing NSA saga. That said, I believe it's positive for different reasons than Greenwald does, but there it is.

On Friday, President Obama will announce a slate of reforms aimed at the National Security Agency's surveillance operations, as well as the FISA Court that oversees it. These changes are expected to be closely related to the recommendations published by the administration's NSA review panel last month. But, predictably, Greenwald and others think the president isn't changing anything.

Glenn Greenwald leaned heavily on his overworked panic button yet again on Sunday during an appearance on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. In a rare spoiler, Greenwald revealed the subject of his next bombshell article for The Guardian before it goes live sometime in the coming days.

On the Globo television show "Fantasico" in Brazil, Greenwald described a July, 2012 document stolen from NSA by Snowden, which describes how NSA had intercepted communications made by the president of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto, and had attempted to intercept communications by Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff.

Reporting for The Intercept, Greenwald and co-author Murtaza Hussain published an article titled, "Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On," based on top secret National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The documents in this case appear to show that between 2002 and 2008 the FBI and NSA collected the email communications of five Muslim-Americans.

As you may have guessed, the book contains a narrative of how he met Snowden and all of the Jason Bourne drama surrounding the reporting. But it also contains new leaks from Greenwald's goody bag of NSA files. One of those files was pre-released on Monday as a teaser for the book. The article, published in The Guardian rather than The Intercept, is titled: "Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers."